There’s been a lot of chatter among the developer class about Microsoft acquiring GitHub. Most of it involves how and where to migrate repositories currently residing on GitHub.
Jamie Zawinski, for one, has no sympathy for developers who are suddenly worrying about the safety of their code. This is what happens, he says, when you store your data in the clown [sic]. He reminds us that the cloud is just someone else’s computer and that you shouldn’t be storing your data there.
I’ve said the same thing many times of course so to a first approximation, I agree with Zawinski. I would never store my only copy of data in someone else’s system. But, of course, that’s not what most GitHub users are doing. Git is, after all, a distributed VCS so project leaders or individuals who just want to share their code have their own copy of the code on their own machines. GitHub provides a convenient way of sharing code and provides an off-site backup for the code.
Some of the commenters note that GitHub provides other services, such a bug tracking, that are not reflected in the code base so those depending on GitHub and similar services do have something to lose if the service suddenly becomes unavailable. Linux, Emacs, and others solve this problem by letting git store the code while using email to manage the project so even that problem is solvable.
Project leaders—and everyone else, for that matter—should be independently backing up their own machines and, if the situation warrants, manage the project independently of the repository. If that’s happening, the project is pretty much insulated—modulo a small amount of inconvenience—from whatever the repository provider does.
As a coda, I should note that many of us who have been around for a while remember what a horrible corporate citizen Microsoft was—and possibly still is—so this post is not defending Microsoft or saying that developers are wrong to want to transition off of GitHub. I’m only saying that it’s probably not an emergency and is, in any event, an easily solvable problem.